England Re-Oriented

How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857

Humberto Garcia

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108495646
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108852135
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

What does the love between British imperialists and their Asian male partners reveal about orientalism's social origins? To answer this question, Humberto Garcia focuses on westward-bound Central and South Asian travel writers who have long been forgotten or  dismissed by scholars. This bias has obscured how Joseph Emin, Sake Dean Mahomet, Shaykh I'tesamuddin, Abu Talib Khan, Abul Hassan Khan, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, and Lutfullah Khan found in their conviviality with Englishwomen and men a strategy for inhabiting a critical agency that appropriated various media to make Europe commensurate with Asia. Drama, dance, masquerades, visual art, museum exhibits, music, postal letters, and newsprint inspired these genteel men to recalibrate Persianate ways of behaving and knowing. Their cosmopolitanisms offer a unique window on an enchanted third space between empires in which Europe was peripheral to Islamic Indo-Eurasia. Encrypted in their mediated homosocial intimacies is a queer history of orientalist mimic men under the spell of a powerful Persian manhood.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Why Re-Orient?
• 1 The British Raj's Mimic Men: Historicizing Genteel Masculinities across Empires
• 2 A Bluestocking Romance: Contesting British Military Masculinity in Joseph Emin's Letters and Memoir
• 3 The Theater of Imperial Sovereignty: Entertaining Diplomatic Failure in Mirza Shaykh I'tesamuddin's London Travels
• 4 Loving Strangers in Ireland: Indo-Celtic Masculinities in the Travels of Dean Mahomet and Mirza Abu Talib Khan
• 5 Heavenly Bodies in Motion: Performing Sexual Revolution in Mirza Abu Talib Khan's Theatrical Metropolis
• 6 Dreaming with Fairyland: Virtual Magic in Yusuf Khan Kambalposh's Travels to Victorian London
• 7 The Making of a Mohamedan Gentleman: Lutfullah Khan, the Indian Mutiny, and Victorian Newsprint
• Epilogue: Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, James Morier, and the Queering of Hajji Baba
• Appendix A Mirza Abu Talib Khan's ''Treatise on Ethics''
• Appendix B Excerpts from Mirza Abu Talib Khan's Diwan-i Talib
• Appendix C Letter by Moonshee Lutfullah
• Select Bibliography
• Index